Love Wins

We had a discussion about the car decal "Love Wins."  I thought, given that it was a Subaru Outback, that it was an LGBT statement, though because it was at an evangelical camp it might still be a holdover from Rob Bell's book that was popular a decade ago. 

I have written about Bell a few times, mostly in 2011. Checking up on him, he seems to have gone further down the celebrity spiritual critic path even more, and is now on the Oprah network.  He maintains he is not saying anything heretical, just raising questions. Could be. He is in to being spiritual, which causes me to look out over the top of my glasses.  I am not interested in the type of questions he wants to raise.  By the end of my attention at that time, I felt he was telegraphing that it was important to see how much liberalism and Jesus overlapped, and to kick people who weren't abandoning ideas he thought they should. That has some use, I suppose, but it wears thin quickly. 

Google (or DDG in my case) splits the top thirty hits or so between the ideas, but I notice the book references tend to be older.  The sticker is likely about gay marriage, then. Drawing attention to itself this way, I noticed for the first time that it has a different tone from a Pride flag. People put Pride flags everywhere, sometimes trying to infuse them with all-the-minorities representation, and I mostly don't notice them.  Sometimes they seem to be a bit much, as when all the churches we saw around Boston Common displayed them prominently.  You really think you need to shout it out there, in a place where everyone already agrees with you? Well fine.  Maybe people would get suspicious if you took it down at this point.

But it's mostly just there in the background, sometimes being injected inappropriately, as anything that's a statement might be, but mostly just sort of vaguely positive and cheery: Shout out to gay people! We really like you! Be encouraged. 

"Love Wins" strikes me as more aggressive. There are always gradations in political statements, and everyone wants to get the effect of maximum challenge while retreating to the blamelessness of minimal interpretation.  It is straight out of Screwtape, where it is used to describe conversation between a man and his mother "I simply ask what time dinner would be and she flies into a temper," and we suspect he did not simply ask that but freighted the comment with more meanings, while she, for her part overreacted. "Black Lives Matter."  My niece and goddaughter  (University of Denver) went on FB to explain to us that "All it means is..." in response to people displaying "All Lives Matter" or "Blue Lives Matter," who were being falsely offended and, and, and...and the latter are also trying to extract maximum pushback with butter-not-melting innocence as well. She is Earnest, and is going to work for an NGO in DC. I worry.

You can find plenty of BLM people - real ones, not cartoons of the Right who will say "no that's exactly what we mean; deal with it." We all want it both ways. No, no, no!  It's mostly older people who just want someone to listen to...

Using the word "Love" is especially irritating to me now that I have looked at it carefully, as the expression rolls several of the meanings and shadings of that word into one as if they were identical.  Well, they certainly aren't the first to do that. As far back as Chaucer (Amor Vincit Omnia) people saw that there were multiple shadings of the word that could be played off each other deceptively.  Love is becoming a red-flag word for me, one that is brought out only for camouflage when the real meaning is opposite. Like putting "truth" in your book title, organisation name, or website. Uh-oh.

I am sure someone will think that I have overread this and ALL the phrase means is...

Iranian Vs. Persian

I heard on a linguistics podcast that it is now considered an affectation to call the Persian language Farsi, unless one was in fact Persian.  Rather like not saying "Paree," or "Moskva" if one is not intimately familiar with it, or pronouncing calamari without the "i" unless one is from Italy, or at least, the North End. It surprised me. I suspect that this may eventually become the case in everyday speech, but for the time being people will use Farsi for two reasons.  First, and most important, it makes you sound educated and knowledgeable, and people don't give that up lightly.  Secondly, any Iranians you meet in America are likely to use the term amongst themselves and have picked up that's what the official sources are using. 

Not all Iranians are Persians, only about 60%, but I think about 90% of the ones who come here are Persians, the rest being Azeris. Kurds, another significant minority, not so much. So pretty much everyone you meet here is happy to call themselves Persian, as they have reasons to distance themselves from the current government. Yet worldwide, and certainly within Iran itself, people are much more likely to call themselves Iranian. Whether people come under suspicion in Iran for calling themselves Persian I don't know, as I have twice heard one thing and once the other. I suspect it is seldom a problem unless someone seems to be making a big deal about "no, not Iranian," because being heir to all of Persian history seems a common attitude.  Maybe there are Islamists who take offense there.

Looking For Things - Borges

There is a difference between looking for a type of thing, such as blueberries or gaps in the trees that provide a view, and a specific thing, such as car keys. The specific thing can only be in one place, and the likelihood of any given place might turn out to be entirely irrelevant.  The searching is frustrating.

I swear there was an alternative-world scenario by Borges in which your keys would actually be 20% in one place, 15% in another, so that you could eventually get up to a good enough percentage to make them usable.  I can't find it.  Perhaps I made up the idea myself and only thought that Borges would be the correct person to write it up.

Expected Defense

Not Surprising that Central Europe is suspicious of Russian aims, seeing that they have been overrun with millions killed within living memory.  Russia is large, but always believes that the next country over is "really" part of it, and needs to be protected from itself.  You will note that these countries have no record of invading Russia.  Still, Moscow remains convinced that any day now, it will happen. 

You will notice that these countries do not have news blackouts.  They don't fear the information getting out, or other ideas coming in to their own people.

Post 8600 - Down the Rabbit Hole

Many versions of Alice.  There are apparently even porn versions of Alice - the mind boggles - but these will have to do.

1903 - Whole movie

1915 - 

 

1931 - Just a bit of it

1933 - Gary Cooper, WC Fields...

1949 -

You are probably familiar with the later versions, though the two TV specials

1955 - A lot of puppetry here

and 1966 - Were new to me.  This one had a laugh track... (There was also a dark slo-mo Alice from '66.)

I do recall Sammy Davis Jr singing this song in the Hanna Barbera version, though.

Pictures and Conversations

...but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice "without pictures or conversations?"

I have included no music videos, nothing humorous, and few pictures recently, and the posts still awaiting completion have none either. Post 8600 is next, and I have to remedy that. Perhaps something from Alice itself would be best.  I played the Mad Hatter in college. 

Polio

Making a comeback.

Euthanasia Canada

Josh Barro passing along some pretty disturbing news about Euthanasia in Canada. 

Echoed and surpassed by Lyman Stone on the same topic. 

I had thought that the Netherlands was the scary one for euthanasia, then Sweden during Covid giving elderly people with the virus morphine (in long-term care) instead of oxygen (in a hospital). I didn't know Canada was a great offender, but euthanasia is (apparently?) the sixth-leading cause of death now.

We talk about slippery slopes and Overton windows of what can be discussed.  I remember doctors I worked with in the 80s advocating for euthanasia of the elderly and infanticide of the severely disabled in the first few weeks.  They felt entirely competent to make those decisions. Almost everyone in earshot was horrified.  I guess not so horrified anymore.

There are people writing about this blaming it on capitalism, I think because if something is viewed solely as a cost-saving measure then the advocates must, simply must, be capitalists.

 

Adulting

 Pretty good for Gawker: Failure to Cope "Under Capitalism."

Capitalism, in this rhetorical strain, is not so much the object of analysis or a concrete historical phenomenon as an all-purpose gesture. “Capitalism” is useful everywhere: as the punchline of self-deprecating jokes about the way we live now, as a perennial-but-distant bogeyman that explains chronic frustrations without ever causing enough pain to force serious disruption. Most importantly, its invocation immediately establishes a phenomenon in the realm of the political, without any further work required.

CWCID: Granite Dad

Colonial Williamsburg, Restoration & Archaeology

To have one thing we sometimes have to give up another in archaeology. Colonial Williamsburg is dedicated to recreating uh, colonial architecture and settings. CNN of course has a different slant on the destruction of a church, as do activists against the erasure of black history. CW acquired a building and tore it down and used the land for other purposes.  It was not a colonial building, so it didn't consider it part of its mission. Honoring local Williamsburg history, or black history, or both might be more worthy goals. But it wasn't their goal. When an old building is restored it is often a matter of some debate what era is going to be favored. The earliest? The largest? The most historically significant? the one with the most pirates or knights or princesses? Archaeologists in Europe two hundred years ago tried to create experiences, impressions of "what it would have looked like" 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years ago. In doing that they sometimes chewed up territory and artifacts in ways that modern archaeologists wish they hadn't. We can try to have an eye to what people will want to see or to study in the future, and now archaeologists take enormous care to destroy as little as possible, just in case.  But when you dig something up, it's no longer where it was.  It is exposed to light, or moisture, or wind now, and will deteriorate.

We make choices.

It's not crazy to think that CW should have made more of an effort to preserve something, because the congregation does date - just barely - from colonial times, and we do often have to bend the rules of strict accuracy in order to preserve something important that would otherwise be missing.  It is true that in the 1950s the historians, let alone the locals, would be likely to undervalue the black history. But they likely would have undervalued any building from 1856. 

As to the burials, they were not known to be there in 1956. It likely would have made some difference. It is sad when people feel sad, but it is not a trump card.  I am really growing to dislike this journalistic method of using old people reminiscing about their childhood in the interests of shaming. The house I was brought home to is gone. A church we went to became a business. The grammar school I attended is apartments now. Unless it's offices - I forget. No one was trying to erase my history.

We do things differently now. A memorial to the enslaved is being constructed on Old Campus at William and Mary. For most of the college's history people would have objected to it far more because it is not colonial looking and impairs the symmetry of the building layout than because it memorialises black people.  But the latter would also have greatly bothered many people as well.  That's just historical fact. We care about different things in every century, even every generation. They still care about preserving that colonial look.  My recently-retired friend was very proud of the ADA approved entrance to the Wren Building that I didn't even notice while I was attempting to prove myself right about the slight asymmetricity of the front and looking at the building closely. It was that subtle. But we consider it more important to belatedly notice black contribution to history now, and that's likely better. 

When we highlight missing black history, we do so by obscuring something else. You really can't do history and archaeology any other way.  Something gets put in front, other things are put behind it.

Chincoteague Ponies DNA

An interesting serendipitous find lends credence to the legend of the Chincoteague ponies, that they swam ashore from a Spanish ship that sank around 1500 and survived on the barrier island. That theory had competed with the idea that the English had brought them in the 1600s. A graduate student studying the domestication of cows found horse DNA mixed in with his finds, and its analysis revealed it is closer to the Chincoteague ponies than anything else. Fun for the children's literature fans, as the dramatic swimming pony was favored in Misty of Chincoteague, a Newbery Honor Book.

The DNA doesn't prove a thing about swimming and shipwrecks versus just being dropped off for later, but it does support the Iberian claim.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

ACX Review - God Emperor of Dune

I remember loving the original Dune but disliking the Dune series more with each new entry as it came out, and God-Emperor most of all. If I think about them at all, it is only the first one.

But I'm a sucker for the intellectual adventurousness of the group over at Astral Codex Ten, so when someone reviewed the final episode I read it anyway.  He rereads it in the light of being suspicious of AI and its human/subhuman/superhuman mixture, which was not something I had considered.

Along the way, he throws in this line, which is a great summation of two other late and fairly irritating books in the series.

For the record, Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune are about sexing uppity women into submission and discovering a literal secret clan of space Jews, respectively. They are not necessarily required Dune reading, but if you are specifically looking for late-career-author-weirdness, they are excellent.

True

Gender Transition Class-Action Suit in the UK

Possible game changer.  Lawsuits will do that. The person who sent this to me has mentioned a few times recently that we may be at peak transitioning, a high-water mark for people, including children, being able to sign up for transitioning without having to answer any hard questions, and being able to silence, shame, or even punish anyone who questions them or tries to interfere.

I mentioned recently that the threat of lawsuits has enabled a lot of the seemingly-incomprehensible responses in colleges and businesses. If that flows back in the other direction it might be just as powerful.

Upcoming

I am back from vacation, with a bunch of posts - mostly interesting links with a little commentary - begun, or at least titled.  My time is not yet quite free, but I should be pushing things along.

Stereotype

 I went to Vermont on twice this week.

This was as I crossed the river into Westminster

These were in a country store in Wilmington. Click to enlarge. Socialpreneur seems an ungainly word.

Yerushalayim Descending

 I recall the song by Lamb in the 1970's.  Probably the best thing they did.

Predictions

Economists have predicted ten of the last two recessions, the saying goes.  If you look around you will find this principle among teachers, preachers, and a hundred types of observers of culture.

The Line

I mentioned The Line just over a week ago, and there was good commentary on it only a few days later on ACX. Scott is not impressed by The Line, nor the other Saudi utopian projects.

I am spending more and more time on that site, as it tackles interesting topics in very clear ways.  An education study that shows that Ritalin works for paying attention, but school isn't worth paying attention to; nootropics, fusion energy, what caused the homicide spike.  All good stuff, and he seems to have little agenda. 

In discussing the Ivermectin controversy, he cautions himself:

Did you believe that?

I did, briefly. Then I remembered the Law Of Rationalist Irony: the smugger you feel about having caught a bias in someone else, the more likely you are falling victim to that bias right now, in whatever way would be most embarrassing.

I certainly see myself in that as well.

Temperature

Not original to me. "Fahrenheit is how people feel, Celsius is how water feels, Kelvin is how the molecules feel."

The Dawn of everything - Again

I continue to read the anonymous book reviews over at ACX, and am enjoying the one on The Dawn of Everything. The reviewer likes some of the book and agrees with some premises but detects large holes in the reasoning, as "the Davids" impose their own progressive politics on the archaeological record.

I heard an interview with Wenfrowe and was impressed, reporting on it in March. David Foster inserted a word of caution about it in the comments and I encouraged him to get back to us about his reading group's conclusions. That may no longer be necessary if this review covers his material. 

A comment by Freddie DeBoer, who I very much like, and have also mentioned.

Forgive me for commenting before reading, though I very much look forward to digesting this review - at the request of some subscribers I started blogging my way through this book but quit in disgust after a few chapters. (I did finish reading it however.) I'm someone with a fairly high tolerance for, let's say, ambitious nonfiction, but in terms of citation and responsible reference to evidence this is one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read. Just hundreds and hundreds of pages of inadequately sourced claims and a few instances of misreadings of the provided citations so egregious that it crosses the line into dishonesty.

Topical Example of Justice

Deshaun Watson got a 6-game suspension.  This could change, as the NFL is an entertainment business and will act in a way which maximises their audience. Goodell might add something to it for appearances sake.

Yet they have constraints to work under, and this gets lost in most of the discussion.  There are contractual agreements in place between the players union and the owner, and previous policies already in place. Ignore all discussions of "well Player A got a year's suspension for gambling/felony assault/deflating footballs" as if those are supposed to be somehow compared to the many civil suits for varying degrees of sexual assault and harassment. Apples and oranges. And yet...

Something similar happens with colleges and accusations, or workplace discipline. At least two separate things are happening. There is a prediscussed and prearranged ranking of how bad one thing is versus another with regards to the institution itself. The NFL clearly does not hate gambling.  In fact, it clearly likes it, as it has rescued what was deteriorating loyalty and interest of fans. But players or coaches gambling hurts the product at a deep level, so even the appearance of tolerating that must be consequated heavily.

Hospitals don't have much opinion one way or the other about people having sex, outside of the medical effects.  But they can't have their own employees engaging in sexual behavior with patients, both for good clinical reasons, but also for reasons of appearance. They have to refrain from behaviors that seem to reduce the safety and good functioning of society in general, and so questions about power differential or sliding scales of consent become quite real. In those instances, appealing to the actual facts of the case and damage done are seldom the point. For the 21 y/o man to protest "Yes, Your Honor, I did buy that bottle of wine for that 19 y/o girl with the express purpose of having sex with her.  However, as she is my wife I think the state's interest in preventing this is considerably lessened" makes all the sense in the world. Yet sometimes such common sense is overruled in highly public or contested cases. Someone might want to make an issue about consensual sex and substances and be choosing this case expressly to challenge whether marriage makes any difference - that is, which value is going to trump the other in law?

I wrote Apples and oranges.  And yet... and now you see what the "and yet" was about. There is a real damage to society in play.  Then there is the appearance of damage to society that the institution is supposed to care about which is vague and unpredictable. It might be only a matter of appearances, with no actual damage to society not already addressed in the laws against speeding or stealing or defrauding others. They are certainly less real, and perhaps have little reality at all.

But those appearances have a reality for the institution, which has to appear to care about the right things.

Wisdom

Proposed: The more people you have in your life telling you you are wise, the more likely it is your are arguing for a side rather than for truth in general, whether overtly or subtly.

If true, you had better pray it's the right side, because then you at least salvage something from your declarations.

The Power of Racists

The conservative press seems consumed by the idea that white people are having their voices silenced, both unofficially and officially, while the liberal press (what liberals think of as simply "the press," like NBC or WaPo) continually reminds us that racists still abound everywhere, keeping black people from reaching their full potential.

There are real racists still out there, plenty of them.  My experience is that most of them are powerless and ignorant people who don't affect much. From their existence, liberals conclude that there must also be many powerful racists as well, who merely hide their tracks better. This may be so. I don't see the least evidence for this among the powerful people I know, but A) I live in NH, which is less diverse than just about everywhere, measurably less violent, and I think less visibly rude than other places* and B) If they were racist I would be unlikely to be among the people they would reveal this to. 

There is also the belief that many aspects of our society are simply racist regardless of the intent of the current citizens, many of whom benefit from the ancient racism continuing and therefore not motivated to change things much.  That's a different topic, which I am not engaging here.  For the record I believe that is true but overstated, brought out as an explanation when more uncomfortable ones are not allowed.

*This is likely related to a cultural approval of privacy and decorum ("don't make a scene" was perhaps the main value I absorbed from my mother's side of the family) rather than more societal kindness. We are always among the lowest in charitable giving, after all, along with the other states with low church attendance.

Actually, It's Fiction

There is a Quillette article on the literary frauds of the 1970's Go Ask Beatrice. Sometimes the works were fictionalised accounts of real information, with the distinction not very clearly noted in order to at least contribute to an impression that the events had actually happened. Others were flat frauds.

I would add that Elie Wiesel's Night seems to be "based on a true story" rather than actual reporting, and remind folks of the Christian comedian Mike Warnke's original start among evangelicals was an entirely made-up account of himself as a satanist in college, The Satan Seller. I knew people who regarded his advice on how to exorcise demons possessing their friends and family as entirely authoritative and Biblical.

11 in 13

Plus two straight NCAA and an Olympic gold, so, maybe 14 out of 16 possible championships is the real number.

There is a sequence showing repeated blocks against Wilt.  One can hardly believe it is possible.

A Persistent Anthropological Myth

The idea that early hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and shared all or most of their resources with each other is remarkably persistent, despite the enormous counter-evidence.  Razib interviewed the anthropologist Manvir Singh, and even though only subscribers can get the transcript of that, links to two Aeon articles by him were included.: 

Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong

 and

Beyond the !Kung: A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale.

A sample of Singh: 

Today, many writers and academics still treat primitive communism as a historical fact. To take an influential example, the economists Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi have argued for 20 years that property rights coevolved with farming. For them, the question is less whether private property predated farming, but rather why it appeared at that time. In 2017, an article in The Atlantic covering their work asserted plainly: ‘For most of human history, there was no such thing as private property.’ A leading anthropology textbook captures the supposed consensus when it states: ‘The concept of private property is far from universal and tends to occur only in complex societies with social inequality.’

Historical narratives matter. In his bestseller Humankind (2019), Rutger Bregman took the fact that ‘our ancestors had scarcely any notion of private property’ as evidence of fundamental human goodness. In Civilized to Death (2019), Christopher Ryan wrote that pre-agricultural societies were defined by ‘obligatory sharing of minimal property, open access to the necessities of life, and a sense of gratitude toward an environment that provided what was needed.’ As a result, he concluded: ‘The future I imagine (on a good day) looks a lot like the world inhabited by our ancestors…’

But it's just not true.  You can see that these are not outdated texts with ideas already on their way out, being kicked as they exit ashamedly by the back door. These are still believed, and even insisted upon.  They are similar to the myth of the peaceful savage, which Lawrence Keeley exploded 25 years in War Before Civilization, yet still persists.  Because people want it to be true, not because it is. It fits their picture of the nature of mankind, of what civilization has done, what colonization has done, not least, their political stances of what we should do now.

CS Lewis pointed out decades ago that there is no cause to believe current hunter-gatherers are a stand-in for previous millennia of them.  The agriculturalists and the industrial societies have taken over niches of their own, consigning the hunter-gatherers to the leftover space.  What they are doing now is an adaptation to their environment, not necessarily their preferred mode. This is not mere theory and corrective, the tendency to recognise private property is far more common than the primitive communism that sends moderns into such rhapsodies. Worse, the extreme egalitarianism sometimes has its own very dark side in infanticide and other killings of tribe members who are going to be a permanent burden. 

The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.

Bill Burr

I have gotten into watching his videos since one went up over at Grim's Hall. I had heard of him but never watched him until this week. I picked this one for no particular reason.

Local-ish boy, comes from Canton and all of you know someone from there. Some of my Puritan ancestors, including most of my American Revolution ones, come from the towns around there.

Victims of Violence

Rafael Manguel over at City Journal is not telling us anything not already well-known here, he's just does it in a clear, well-supported fashion. On Criminal (In)Justice. He hits the key point very quickly.  Whenever you read the numbers about who is stopped, arrested, or incarcerated, make the immediate correction: Who are the victims of violent crime? You will read many times over the statistics about how many young black (and to a lesser extent, Hispanic) men are arrested before you see the ones about who the victims of violence are. They are also black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic). Do we care about them or don't we?  It seems like a simple question.  Apparently not.

Prominent athletes - not coincidentally young and male - make much of the unfairness of who is bothered by the police. They seldom mention who the victims are. One would think that was an automatic other side of the coin, as they have mothers, aunties, friends, and siblings who have heightened risk of being victims. Yet it is not commonly noted. Why it's almost as if it is them and their friends who really matter...

Group Prayer

 Yeah...

Neuroscience Advice

I remain suspicious of #1 Habit!!, self-help, SCIENCE-has-discovered personal advice - skeptical, if you will. Even the best ones seem to sell themselves with one-weird-trick style advertising, which puts me off. But I have liked Huberman and am thinking of putting up a couple of his. The PTSD one, if it holds up, would be along the lines of where my own thinking had taken me over the years, though with more clarity and definitely more supporting evidence. 

He's the real deal for credentials.  So I thought I'd start with this one, which seems innocent enough even if it's wrong, and tells me I've been doing things right all along, which always pleases me.

Undecided Whale

Ethan Strauss, sports journalist turned cultural disrupter over at his Substack* site House of Strauss, coined the phrase Undecided Whale to describe the marketing change from appealing to your core customers to a larger group that seems to be hovering nearby, just waiting for you to sell it things. The NBA, we are all noticing the last few years, cares more about China than the US even though the bulk of its revenue comes from American TV rights.  Nike built its brand on alpha masculinity and still has two-thirds of its sales from men, but sees that women's market, just sitting there nearby, larger than the male clothing market by a considerable margin. 

He doesn't think it will be good for culture or Nike. 

*Of course.

Skeptical!

 James just put up a post about The Line, with comments of his own which are preliminary but sharp.

This fits my idea of being skeptical.  Not only am I not opposed to people discovering new ways to organise their lives, I am positively in favor of it. Multiple tries. Lots of people should take a shot at it. I'm not going to laugh at any of them or criticise them. Like those floating cities that belong to no country or those islands attempting to be self-sufficient, I love this stuff.  Go for it. Send me reports weekly.  Write if you get work and all that.

But the better the sci-fi graphics and the denser the cliches, the more worried I am that these people are not among those who have done the simple everyday human things known for thousands of years, like raising children, being stuck in a sucky job, organising a two-car funeral, or wandering into another tribe's territory.

But go for it, guys. Best of luck. We may learn a great deal even if it's a failure.

Please comment there, not here. CWCID.

Calendrical Stonehenge

Tim Darvill, OBE, who we have met here before, has a new paper about the possible calendrical intents of Stonehenge. We have long known about the solstice identifying stones, but he has a good deal more detail offered. This one is not just a 365-day calendar, but a 365.25-day one, with additional counters counting off the four years for the additional day. Indigenous, or copped from the Eastern Mediterranean? 

Calendrical speculation is easy whenever there are stones standing up and you can count them. There is a lunar cycle of 18.6 years, so anytime you find 9 stones in a pattern, or 19, you can say "Voila! It must be representing the lunar cycle! They counted off the years." Anything around 28 days you can say is the other lunar cycle. Four stones and it's solstices and equinoxes somehow. 13 stones is moons in a year. It gets to be like p-hacking, so that whatever number of stones you have, you can make them into some sort of calendar, especially if you start breaking them into groups. 

Another problem arises when it turns out the various stones at a site were put up in different eras, as is the case at Stonehenge. It makes the explanations harder to square. As the several eras of original builders of the site were all uh, replaced by other tribes moving in, we also lost some continuity of what things might mean to them.  Remember making grandfather into a flute, still one of my favorite stories.

And yet when you have 30 stones, and they have these gaps that arrange them into 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30, you get nicely into the 12 months of 30 days territory, with 36 ten-day weeks.  Need five more days? The Egyptians had a major festival every year of five days, celebrating five gods, a little before this. And at Stonehenge...we have the five sarsen trilithons arranged in a horseshoe shape in the interior.  Nice big ones, appropriate to represent gods...Was there communication at such a distance between those cultures at times that might possibly provide explanation.  Opinions have differed sharply over the years, as the article explains.

Well a problem remains, in that there doesn't seem to be anything counting those 12 months.  That is not dispositive, as they could have been far outside the circle and still functional, but it does remain that we haven't got 'em, or not yet.

Although archaeological accounts often rehearse the notion that early farmers needed time-reckoning systems to know when to plant and when to harvest, no self-respecting farmer needs to be told these things—their skill and experience dictates how they work the land. Where farmers do need guidance, however, is in knowing when to celebrate the harvest festival for best effect, or when to please the gods with their presence at key ceremonies. Hutton (Reference Hutton1996: 427) reviewed 40 festivals recorded in Britain over recent centuries, and while many were modern inventions, he found a vigorous seasonal, festive culture surviving from ancient times. These are not so much calendar festivals as festivals whose timing has been calendarised: important events that serve as landmarks in time (Nilsson Reference Nilsson1920: 83)...time-reckoning systems bring communities closer to their gods by ensuring that events occur at propitious moments.

 

Stonehenge Tunnel

There is a controversy about the preservation of the Stonehenge site that seems so obvious to me that I must not quite understand one side (of at least three) of it. 

"Since 1991, 51 proposals have been considered for improving the A303 in the area and to remove it from the Stonehenge site." So, as I recently just wrote, there's your first problem right there. Everyone agrees it needs to be fixed, no one agrees on what the fit should look like. 

There is the opinion of the archaeologists looking long term.  There is the opinion of the people who live in the area, for whom these roads are "the route that I take to work," or to shopping, or to check in on Gramps every day. I think I get both of these.  The former says "there is not just one site, there is an array of sites in the area, and they are irreplaceable.  Take the course, no matter how expensive and inconvenient, that maximises flexibility for learning about the people who lived in these places over thousands of years. The latter group takes the position that history and prehistory are just fine, but we live here right now. Why should the lives of the living matter less than the lives of the dead? As an excellent example of this, many decisions were made during WWII about where to place military bases or how to move troops or materiel across the landscape.  That seems distant, unimportant and unnecessary now.  Yet at the time it was very legitimate arguement "We aren't going to even have a nation, and our conquerors are going to destroy everything of our history.  So don't tell me how important this pile of stones or pots or bones is.  They are only important in the context of everyone living in peace and sending the daughters of rich parents to Oxbridge to study this. Other Englishmen, though less important in your eyes, don't much care about the details.  They want their England to survive for another generation for their children. Stonehenge nice, but England better. And why is this costing two billion pounds when the original estimate was one-tenth that? This group seldom articulates its position well, and therefore gets made fun of as boors who don't care about science or history or Quality Things in general. 

They therefore get thrown in with what we might call the shallow conservationists, whose position is not much defensible at all, but often have strong feelings, an ability to conjure, and some influence. They want things to look like Merrie Olde England, dammit, and be able to march right up and see Stonehenge whenever they damn well please without interference from government or uni people with their (possibly anti-England and anti-traditional) ideas. They want thatched roofs and canal boats and you can't even get a pint of Watney's Red Barrel anymore. We actually do know this sort in every country in the world. In America one version is the people who want the old traditional hymns that are actually 100-200 years old, no more, no less, because that just seems holy to them. (Look, I like a lot of those hymns and sing them with gusto, but you have to know what you're saying before spouting off.)  Traditional means grandparent. There are versions in every town. This gets humorous only when you are something of an outsider, noticing that traditional foods for Passover means Egypt only for the purely ceremonial parts, but mostly means Delancey Street. If you are actually inside on one side of the controversy it's not so funny.

Satire and sendups are funnier when they are meant affectionately (see my posts on earlier Keillor vs later Keillor. The first two tell you much, no need to scrape the barrel in my other posts.), and I don't think Pete's intentions are kindly here. Yet I think Arlo's are, so we will give the song a pass.

Anyway, Stonehenge is ground zero for that sort of argument in England, with more archaeologists per capita than elsewhere, more non-archaeolgoists opinionated about the topic, and more protected sites, leading to more people living and driving in and amongst them. And being Stonehenge, there is a full contingent of people getting exercised about fanciful history or what should be true, but isn't, in science and archaeology. So there is debate about the proposed Tunnel under Stonehenge. There. Are. Protests. 

If you put the visitor center bang up against the stone circle then lots of people can bus out there, go to the gift shop, and see the stones easily.  But then when you stand back to contemplate the ancient site...it's got a visitor center in it.  Same for nice roadways going by. As for the tunnel, people are worried that it will destroy future archaeology. Well, but the immediate site has been worked over quite a bit and we aren't likely to find gripping new things. The new things, like the discovery of Durrington Walls, came about because a road was being built. Archaeologists are much more interested in the less-explored areas in the wider area, especially to the west of Stonehenge. 

Taking the entirety of the ritually-used landscape, suspicion is growing that Avebury may turn out to be the bigger deal and tell us more going forward. (We are very pro-Avebury around here.) The shallow conservationist position is based on the idea that there are very few important things out there and they are deeply endangered, so we have to basically Not Touch Anything. Yet if we have learned anything in the last hundred years it is that there are lots of new things being discovered all the time that we have barely studied at all. Most of the discoveries arise because of construction - of roads, golf courses, shopping districts, apartments. The Amesbury Archer was discovered because they were building a school.

The Semi-Rich

Via the excellent Rob Henderson, who just finished a session teaching "Forbidden Courses" at University of Austin, is this Vox article about the semi-rich. It does indeed identify an important group culturally and economically, and even dimly senses what they are all about. Yet it is mostly an excellent exercise for those looking for "unproven assertions and unwarranted assumptions which lead to the conclusions that were clearly hoped for by the author." Take your blood pressure medication first.

Skeptical

We have moved into using the word "skeptical" in an unfortunate way, when we actually mean "disbelieving."  I am skeptical of political claims by Republicans, but I am disbelieving of those by Democrats. I don't approach the latter with an attitude of "Well, this could be true, but I will reserve judgement until I know more." I begin by rejecting the claim. It takes a lot for me to admit "Huh. Well that turned out to be true after all." With Republican claims, I could go either way.

I think the distinction is important because skeptical feels like an intellectually superior position to take about many things. We are thoughtful, we have high standards for being convinced, we are a skeptic, not easily taken in, doncha know. Not gullible like the hoi polloi. But reflexively disbelieving any religious claim does not make one a religious skeptic who regards claims of miracles with suspicion, but an unbeliever who simply rejects them. There are people who are skeptical of the efficacy of one vaccine or another, but most people who proudly bear the title of skeptic are just anti-vaxxers.

We are seldom skeptical about a topic for long. It takes intellectual effort, and we all prefer efficiency. We like to come down on one side or the other, having a ready belief about what is probably happening.

It came up today with someone noting a link about long covid and saying they are skeptical.  No, they aren't skeptical at all. Skeptics think about a subject. This particular person is not regarding such claims warily, he is simply rejecting them because he is now certain that all such claims are bunk. He might be convinced, I suppose, by sustained and mounting evidence reported, but I am not even sure of that.  He might simply be a disbeliever forever, congratulating himself on how wise he is. You can't take us in.  the Dwarves are for the dwarves.  

I don't think it is unreasonable to be a disbeliever about many things. Many ideas circulate for years even though they are ridiculous. But be careful not to give yourself credit for a wise attitude when one is not in evidence.

I am skeptical of your claim to be a skeptic - and with some people I am disbelieving of that claim, right out of the chute.

1966

The Sixties-ness seems a bit contrived, forced.  But I always liked the song all those years when I had no idea of any video that might be put to it. just the Spoonful

Stonehenge

I have short Stonehenge post that has gotten completely out of control.  I am in some manicky tangential phase intellectually. As Snoopy said, years ago

“It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.” Then Snoopy types the words “Part 2” and tells us, “In Part 2 I’ll tie all of this together.”

There's Your First Problem Right There

 Grim has linked to a UC Davis study about political violence. The Introduction

Recent events in the United States (US)—mass shootings, Supreme Court decisions, hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and others—have reminded Americans of the daily presence of violence in their nation’s public life. This study is motivated by 5 recent trends that, in their apparent convergence, create the potential for even greater violence that could put at risk the future of the US as a free and democratic society.

So we know - or at least I know, and Grim picked up on immediately - that they have a biased view of the topic, right out of the gate. This is important, because if they are designing questions, they will just naturally be drawn to phrasings that give away the game; they will unconsciously select the data around them that confirms their bias and will interpret that information in ways that accentuate that. (Grim drew his conclusion from their funding sources, noting that this does not disprove or even undermine their conclusions, but should be a red flag about where it might go wrong.)

And in fact, this is exactly what happens, beginning with the next paragraph, which outlines the limitations of previous attempts to define and measure support for violence and the difficulty of discerning exactly what is being said - and then immediately ignores that, going straight to naive interpretations of data and selective statistics about violence. One might almost think it was a "spot the bias" exercise specifically designed to instruct journalists and researchers, but alas, I have every reason to believe this is intended for straight. Worse, I have every reason to believe that if the researchers were informed there were a couple of minor blogs which detected bias in their work, they would be unable to pick out what that is, even when cued.

So I will point it out, futilely for them and likely unnecessarily for my audience and thus likely only for my own enjoyment. Except I'm not enjoying it, so "exercise" might be a better word.

Mass shootings...are not up over time, and thus are not to be counted as recent events in the sense of a trend, as said events have occurred both remotely and recently. Yet the intent is clear that we are to think so, to get activated to our danger immediately, as it they are the first thing mentioned.

Supreme Court decisions...define your terms, please. Do you mean that previous SCOTUS decisions have not tended to remind Americans of "the daily presence of violence" but recent ones have?  Which decisions, exactly, and in what way do they remind us of violence? I will stretch a bit and offer there is a feeling, not quite clear in their own minds, that there is increased danger of violence as evidenced by the fact that "our side is losing." If they mean something else, I would like to know what that is, for after it was stripped of the initial explanation of "trust in institutions" and "feelings of powerlessness" what we will have is some actual violence from the left, against buildings, against people, and yes, the sense that "our side is losing." 

Hearings investigating...but those are events from 18 months ago, so however concerning they might be, they aren't a reminder of a daily presence of violence, they are more a daily reminder of previous violence. Tricksy. Or not. The frightening thing is that they are not trying to intentionally reword things to trick us and make us think of violence. They likely just think this way on their own, are getting nervous, and are expressing why, knowing that their audience largely shares their bias and thus are among friends.

...and others.  What others? Please, do tell.  Otherwise we will have to give you no credit for anything except puffery.

Others might include increased riots  over the last two years, but those go strangely unmentioned. And others might include digging into the later statistics about the alarming increase in homicides - they are careful to tie that to GUNS! GUNS! Do you hear me, they've got GUNS! - but not so careful to tell us exactly where these increases are occurring, whether it relates to changes in policing, and who is doing it. Why, you would think it was just this troubling increase in people* being willing to be violent because of their attitudes. Or maybe the Supreme Court is making us do this.

All of this not to say that there is nothing useful in their study.  It is just that it is tedious having to apply a discount to every statistic. They make much of an answer endorsed by 32% of Americans about "a group of people in this country [is] trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants." Well, replace isn't the word I would choose, as it carries an air of getting rid of those people, and that is an extremity of view held by few (I hope.) But there are unquestionably people, and they have NGO's who are tickled to tell you the projections that whites are decreasing in percentage of Americans ("and you'd better get used to it, bucko") and advocating we bring in more immigrants. And can I just say that "native-born" is a very accurate description of black people more than white in America, as they have generally been native for two centuries or more, while a lot of Swedes, Jews, and Irish came later. Yet I think the term was chosen to suggest whiteness without actually saying so.  That may be a reach on my part, At any rate, there is a group in this country who want to "replace" native-born by immigration (plus fertitlity, I suppose), and they will say it right out loud.  I might use phrasings about increasing the number of immigrants as less loaded.  But we don't get to choose the wording of poll questions.  We don't get to say "Yes, but..." to them.  We have to take what is offered and choose agree versus disagree.  When I am presented with a question like that I get annoyed, because I both know what is a correct answer and also what false conclusion they are going to draw.  As here. 

And here's the kicker on that last one: the original poll question, out of the University of Chicago, closed with the phrase "for electoral purposes."  Well, that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it? That actually does take us into the realm of flat dishonesty, of leaving out a key bit of information to make one thing look like another.  Also, from the line just before that reporting "...two-thirds of Americans feel the country’s diverse population makes the US stronger – less than 10% say diversity weakens the country." How are we to square that with the dire language of 32% of Americans believing in dark conspiracies to replace them?

This grows tiresome, as a favorite psychiatrist of mine used to say at team meetings. You can try to gather information from the study if you want.  There are valuable things there. But the signal to noise ratio is poor.

*And by this point you have a clear idea how those people are voting.

CS Lewis on Courage

All sorts of things will make a man brave for the time being: alcohol, ignorance of the danger, anger, self-respect, human loyalty, and love of God. But they are not equally good sources. ("The Anvil" a radio broadcast on the BBC with CS Lewis in 1943)

Mondo Again

 The record vault is just before the 3 minute mark.  He looks like he has more to go, as well.

He is from Louisiana, but vaults for Sweden.

I would rather watch the mile relay (now the 4X400 meters) at a track meet than anything else.  I would watch fifth-graders run that event.  The two US teams did incredibly well this time around, if you like following that stuff.

Internet Intermittent

Comcast encouraged us to upgrade our router for free, and we have had difficulties ever since. I love it when they improve my life by ruining it like that. I did all the restarts and diagnostics I knew they were going to run anyway, but they still wanted to do them themselves.  Sigh.  So would I, I guess, if I were on the other end of the line.  It really throws them that we don't have TV at all. I finally got through to a person, got cut off, got through to another person who eventually gave up and said they will send a technician Wednesday.

Faster Carmelised Onions

A YouTube cooking video mentioned using baking soda to carmelise onions more quickly, so I thought i would check it out.  The claims are that the cooking can be done in ten minutes, which sounded impossible to me.  It was about a decade ago I came across an article that gave me great comfort, reassuring me that those recipes calling for carmelised onions quickly were a lot of hooey.  In fifteen minutes, the best one could hope for was to burn them.  Carmelising took 45 minutes or more. As I love these little things dearly, whether in long thin crispy strips or mushy piles of tiny snakes, I resolved to start making them more often, now that I knew how, and knew that I was in for a longish time preparing.

No problem, really.  White wine goes well with  carmelising onions. In the cook, I mean. And that is the way it has been for a decade. I occasionally make a double batch and give some to my daughter-in-law, because the others in her family don't like onions.

I thought the experiment run by National Onion Association could be relied on for objectivity. They were skeptical but agreed that the carmelising was much quicker, from 45+ minutes to about 13.  Mine went almost 20 when I usually go an hour, so I thought it a success.  Flavor excellent. Texture a little mushy.  Sometimes that doesn't matter, sometimes it does.  It depends on what you are using them for. Site bookmarked. Key point: Very little baking soda, 1/8 tsp per pound.

The home page has lots of video display of onions being harvested, sorted, and moving along conveyor belts to be packaged in order to make their way to me. It warms the heart to see them.

Depression and "Chemical Imbalance"

An umbrella review of the evidence dismisses the idea that inadequate serotonin levels or a "chemical imbalance" are what causes depression.  Most simply, there is no level of serotonin that we are supposed to be getting to, and it has never been clear what "chemicals" are supposedly "imbalanced" in the brain. Not that serotonin is never involved, or that creating some chemical changes in the blood which affect the brain aren't part of effective treatment of depression, they often are. It's just that the description does not universally apply and the terms are so vague as to be meaningless. 

There is some discussion of the history of the controversy and the meaning of the review in a Psychology Today column that is helpful, and includes these quotes from the lead author 

We do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation and prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.

And

It is high time to inform the public that this belief is not grounded in science.

I was informed of all this from a tweet by Pradheep J Shanker @ Neoavatara that includes considerable discussion itself.

I was frankly surprised by the controversy, as I had never used the chemical imbalance explanation in my career nor heard another clinician use it.  When the phrase came up, it was from a patient or a family member who had latched onto it as a description that satisfied them. We would usually not contradict this explanation so much as redirect it to the idea that depressions are different and the mechanism in the brain is unclear. However, the medications do help a fair number of people (relatively) quickly and a lot, and a further percentage are helped partially. The medications are designed to target particular receptors, and when that is done effectively people's moods often improve.

So usually, worth a try. Sometimes they do magic. But depressions are indeed different.  Medical conditions can cause depression.  Grief can cause it. We increasingly regard anxiety and depression as related or co-occuring. I have always thought there is a hard-wired baseline of mood, with some just naturally more sanguine and others more melancholic, to use historical terms. I used the analogy of a sponge, either absorbing water and riding lower in it versus not absorbing it and riding above it.  Buoyant, if you will. But I liked it because it was quite clearly a metaphor, not an explanation.  No one was going to confuse depression with actual water absorption. (I hope.)

Because of the speed of effect - anywhere from immediately to a few weeks out and increasing over the next months, versus weeks of therapy - and my personal experience I have long been pro-medicine. We always had very limited bed space and wanted to move people along as quickly as possible, contrary to the belief of many patients and some of the public that we like to hold people indefinitely for little reason. People went off their meds, became symptomatic, came to the hospital.  We would restart meds, they would quickly get better and go home.  I was a big part of what a psych hospital does, though not everything. I also had psychotherapy for OCD for 2.5 years and learned a lot about myself and felt very grateful to be able to share deep confessional information.  But my symptoms weren't any better.  But in a couple of weeks on Prozac (it became the gold standard for OCD but this was when it was only approved for depression - I had gotten myself into a study) my symptoms were greatly reduced. And, I noticed a lightening of mood that made me wonder whether I had been mildly depressed all along. We all weight our own experience, or that of our family, higher than is quite justified for a scientific understanding.  But hey, that's the head we live in, so it looms larger.

I always thought it was just something people used as a shorthand. "Well, they are chemicals. And they change the chemicals in the brain. So they must be raising some level or correcting some imbalance, right?" And yes, being balanced sounds like a good way to think of being mentally healthy, sure. But apparently the complaint is with the pharmaceutical companies, who embraced this pop-psych explanation as a marketing assist, and with doctors who don't spend the time on a better explanation. That makes sense.  Looking at the percentages of people who understand depression in terms of chemical balance or imbalance, I can see why people get exercised about the poor understanding to the point of calling it misinformation. Odd that I was not particularly aware of the controversy at all, except that not having a TV I was not exposed to sly pharma ads capitalising on the convenient misunderstandings.

Moving To Canada

Update include, of something I missed yesterday.  Sorry.

A liberal friend thought she might like moving to Canada. I had already hit her with the unwelcome* news about the racial breakdown of violent crime** - and thus gun ownership and gun laws and gun culture are not the drivers of American violence vis-a-vis Europe and Canada - so I didn't want to close by overloading her.  But when I hear that people want to move to Canada, or Western Europe, I immediately think so you want to move to whiter places.  Why? That's not how they have framed this in their own minds, and they would deny that race has anything to do with.  Directly, and consciously, this is likely true. Nonetheless, the places they choose are always very white.

If conservatives were as racist as is claimed, it is they who would be ignoring minor differences and lining up to go to Denmark and Austria.

Canada has an increasing Asian population - you know, the ones that are criticised on American college campuses as being too white-aligned - and since reforming immigration laws in the mid 60s has started allowing black immigrants from the Caribbean, especially Commonwealth countries, those numbers have increased as well, though they are still small at about 3%. (Only that recently?  Yes, quite recent.) No Hispanics, really, and First Nations peoples are about the same percentage as in America. Yet somehow rednecks don't want to go there.

Canada also has a nice semi-European feel with a big chunk of people speaking French and closer ties to the UK, so that's a draw for liberals as well. And Canadians are defensive about not being Americans, so that's also fun. I like the place myself, and the UK as well. I can see moving to Canada - my grandfather was from Nova Scotia - or some places in Europe,  but knowing what I do now about the demographics I would feel a bit guilty about it, wondering if I had some (previously unconscious) racist motives for it. 

*She was shocked, stating that she had never heard this before.  I could not tell if she meant "This must not be quite true, because I have followed such things moderately closely for decades," (Yes, but on NPR and in elite media) or "Why has no one told me this before?" This is of course a main problem of discussing things with liberals, because they believe an array of intertwined untrue things, and you no sooner start to give the evidence, often quite obvious, for one point when it bashes up against another false belief that will also need to be undone before they will consider your claims about the first one. Hence red-pill, blue-pill metaphors. Hence my statement from years ago that the journey out of liberalism is not so much an intellectual one - that part is easy and straightforward - but a personal journey of uncomfortable self-discovery.  Which is why it often becomes deeply related to religious questions as well.

**I don't like bringing it up at all, but it becomes necessary when gun regulation folks start making claims about restricting firearms being the solution. 

Memes

I may have shared what is usually called a meme, a photo with a smart-aleck statement on it,  over the years.  I have a near relative who does this often on Facebook, which is a primary reason why I first unfollowed him and then got off FB.  He is capable of solid argument, but even in email correspondence no longer does so. One more bit of evidence that we do not become wiser as we age and should be very suspicious of life-extension strategies. 

My number of memes may be small, but I can still reduce them. The number is now zero.  Call me out if I transgress on this.  The new article at Quillette is quite persuasive. It includes a bit of meme history as well.

The subset of memes that focus on politics are generally designed to boil complex issues down to a digestible combination of emotive image and sloganeering text that flatters those who agree with its message and provokes those who do not. 

Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation,” and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being—inaccurately—mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder.*

...But since memes add almost nothing to public discourse that would offset the risks, it’s probably worth hesitating before sharing them.

Of note, frequent commenter David Foster has written about the topic at Chicago Boyz, with reference to a previous Quillette essay on the topic.

*Italics mine, and no, not all the symptoms, but a a goodly percentage, yes, even by strict clinical standards.

Sidney McLaughlin

I don't care much about women's track-and-field, and I resent YouTube and other outlets trying to force feed it to me as something as I should be concerned with just as much as men's T&F. Frankly, the YouTube videos seem to have a lot of pretending to care about athleticism but somehow always focusing on the women's butts in their almost thonglike shorts. Similar to beach volleyball that way. It's irritating. 

But when you follow the men, you can't help but getting the headlines, the "earlier today" commentary on the videos, and the sidebar of the women's events. Plus I have always liked the middle distances and the off-events, those non-sexy (in the popularity sense) events, like the hurdles, steeplechase and  the "-athlons." So I have to mention Sidney McLaughlin and her stunning records at this point. For reference, the woman in lane 6 is running at a pace that used to be world-best for any year until about 2015, while the women in lanes 1 and 3 would have been Olympic champions since forever. This world record used to go down about 0.03 or 0.07 every few years.  That's it. The second-place finisher would have been lionised as revolutionising the event until two years ago.

Sidney McLaughlin is flat-out amazing.

If you want to watch the other world championship events, you will notice that many small Caribbean nations like Grenada or T&T do very well.  And of course there's Jamaica. 

But don't you dare believe in genetics.

Fnord

 Today I learned what a fnord is .  Fascinating initial concept and usage.

The Man From the Future

 From the review by Scott Siskind at ACX of the biography of John von Neumann 

Still, he had the presence of mind to make a last request: after a lifetime of culturally-Jewish atheism, he wished to be baptized. His daughter attributed her father’s “change of heart” to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small probability of gaining a better afterlife is worth the relatively trivial cost of a deathbed conversion. Even as his powers deserted him, John von Neumann remained a game theorist to the end.

Pascal's Wager has been dismissed as an idea that looks intelligent at first, but upon examination is revealed as impossible, as there are so many religions, so many gods one would have to please.  I have always thought that as a practical matter, that is not so.  We are presented with a few at most in our lifetimes.  Who considers becoming a Zoroastrian now, for example?  Or any of the thousand flavors of animist? Still, that is not a proof of the wisdom of the the Wager.

Unless the smartest person who ever lived thought otherwise, I suppose...

I recommend this review as well.

Bleg - And Archaeology Cartoon

I was sent a cartoon that relates to some of my archaeology posts.  What are the laws about permission to post it on my site?

Well, let's try it.  This does fit with my comments about mis- or overinterpreting archaeologiscal evidence.

If I have used this improperly I will gladly take it down. It is from Science Cartoons Plus, the site of Sidney Harris. Some of the gallery cartoons look familiar from years ago, and the bio tells me he has been drawing science cartoons since 1955.

In for a penny, in for a pound: this cartoon seems prophetic, as humorists often are.

 

Causing Me To Reconsider Haidt

Astral Codex Ten is having a fun contest with solicited book reviews. The reviewers are kept anonymous to keep their identities (presumably quite recognisable to the group) from biasing the voting. They are long, and this may take a while.  But ACX has very good commenters in addition to Dr. Siskind, and I think it will be worth it.  

The first one I am reading is a review of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, and while the reviewer finds many good things in the book, he is generally negative, finding it inadequate and weak rather than wrong.  I am a fan of Haidt, and have written about him with approval a couple of dozen times over the years, including that book in specific.  Yet as I read along I found myself agreeing with the criticisms and wondering how much to reevaluate. 

In particular, I agreed with how inadequate Haidt's understanding of the psychology of conservatives is. The reviewer grew up in a Fundamentalist/Pentecostal culture and now seems to be a liberal with New Atheist sympathies. He claims he could give a much better description of what the motivations are than Haidt does in this book - and I think he succeeds. Perhaps I have been grateful that a liberal (now centrist) social psychologist had any reasonable words for conservatives and religious people at all when I first encountered him.

Update:  For example

As a result, he engages with neither rank-and-file God’n’guns religious conservatism nor the intellectual conservative tradition of “what is good for the masses to believe is not identical to what’s fundamentally true, please consult my 60,000 word essay on decision theory, game theory, computational load, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for details, therefore Catholicism”. He doesn’t really seem to realise that either of these positions exists, and “steel-mans” conservatism into some sort of superposition across “group selection informs us as to normative ethics” and “group selection is teleological towards utilitarian human flourishing”, both of which are utterly insane positions that I think almost nobody actually holds.

It's a good take, and good writing.

Democrats Bankrolling Fringe Republicans

Republicans that they consider fringe, anyway.  Easier to beat in the general election. Claire McAskill has used it before, which I missed when it happened. NPR and WaPo are both reporting on the phenomenon.

It seems dishonest and anti-democratic in the extreme. I don't like the idea of pretending to be undeclared in order to vote in the other primary either, though I hear it has been done. Tactical voting makes me uncomfortable in general.  Parties should nominate who they want without interference. I don't want the Democrats to nominate a crazy-bad candidate, but one that I think would be least damaging. One of these days it's going to go badly wrong, such as if a candidate dies before the election or has some major scandal knock them out.

Also, imagine the extension of this if it is successful even just a bit, of both parties putting money into opponents they think they can paint as dangerous - sometimes with good reason. Heck, you could hire stealth members of your own party who are actors and give them lots of money to run.  In a primary with several candidates you start to get some real wild-card outcomes. 

I can't see any way to forbid it that isn't even more anti-democratic.

Stay

 Did I post this already a few months ago?  I've been singing it since winter.

Lest We Forget

Posted in April 2006. It was on the car of a coworker, a socially graceful MSW who now lives down in Asheville. Sorry, Grim. We haven't always sent our best, I'm afraid. Imagine it with Hillary or Obama instead, what the outcry would be.

Robot Birthday

On August 5th, 100,000 robotic lawn mowers can sing Happy Birthday to the loneliest robot in the universe.

 

Husqvarna is offering an add-on so the lawn mowers can sing Happy Birthday to Curiosity on Mars.  My son has one of these (Hank may be my favorite grandchild) and is planning to sign on.

Etiology and Treatment of Childhood

I posted this years ago, and send it to friends from time-to-time. The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood.

Popular Governors

 It is worth noting the left-hand side of the graph, where a few governors are not greatly disliked, even if they are not particularly liked.

AI Error

I mentioned my daughter-in-law's TikTok account Pinay Sa Alaska (Filipina in Alaska) which has become very popular in the Philippines. The account was suddenly blocked, and they couldn't figure out why.  She appealed, and some sites suggested that it might be weeks or even months  before a determination was made.  She was reinstated in four days, and the report included the offending footage, which was determined to not violate community guidelines after all.

It was a video closeup of my son cleaning a salmon.  Big knife.  Blood. She had been shut down while she was still talking in the background, so the thinking is that the AI cannot distinguish between human and fish being cut by a big knife, with blood, and just shut her down automatically.

Fall of the Roman Empire

Just a few notes based on what I have been picking up from reading and podcasts.  The information isn't new, but it had not fully penetrated my thinking until recently.  There is debate about how much the empire actually fell, as opposed to merely changing, and different times are assigned to different "falls." 476 AD is fine, it just relies on a number of assumptions, and people could and have picked earlier and later times. 

Because I am more interested in what occurred in northern Europe, particularly Romano-Britain, I find it clearest to look at the whole enterprise regionally. While we can legitimately claim that Rome itself kept its institutions and mostly just got a new set of rulers, in Britain there was an unquestionable collapse of empire. On the far frontier such as Hadrian's Wall, there was loss of money, then population in the market towns supporting the wall forts as the pay for the garrison soldiers became more irregular, and then in a very few years around the year 400 the forts themselves were abandoned, and no fresh money comes to the frontier at all. There might be over 1000 living in the fort, all requiring food, drink, clothing, animals and repairs - a solid market for the locals, and in a decade, nothing. One after another the garrisons were abandoned, beginning with the Antonine Wall long before in 150AD, the last expansion to the north and unwise from the start. 

Just a bit further east in the borders with the various Germans the collapse was similar, but much of this was because of the local tribes, which had invariably been described as fractious and undisciplined before this, learned to bad together at least temporarily and throw the Romans out. It highlights the difficulty of separating what is an internal cause and which is external.  The unity of the tribes against them looks like an entirely external force.  Yet they only grew up and grew together because so many of the tribes had members who had worked in the Roman military for part of their lives.  Individuals, clans, or whole tribes would hire themselves out to the Romans, who always needed a steady supply. While it is true that Rome still hoped to send new recruits to other regions to specifically avoid the conflict of interest and temptations of corruption and desertion, this became increasingly impractical. Some might still be sent to Palmyra or Spain, but others were temporary and never left the frontier.  They absorbed Roman discipline and practice and could therefore meld more easily with other tribes with similar experience. 

A second bit recently learned is that the earliest archaeology in England was often less concerned with learning what earlier peoples had been like than with simply exposing the ruins to view as much as possible.  This was a teaching tool so that everyone would have some idea what things looked like, and also something of a mood piece or decoration, an illustration of the past. Locales were proud of having their very own ruin to display. Because sites that were in agricultural settings had often been plowed over numerous times, there wouldn't be much to find, or even identify what had been there.  This gave primacy to more remote places where the agriculture was pastoral, disturbing the ruins less. Such remoteness also discouraged raiding the structures for usable stone over the centuries. The archaeology of Newcastle, just as an example, is under lots of other archaeology of Newcastle. Romantic hilltop views suitable for postcards are thus overrepresented, both in the landscape and in our imaginations.

Cognitive Distortions

James points out the new Quillette article about IQ research.  I hadn't realised the deception had risen to that level of power, but this is the common pattern, yes. Lump unconnected people together to create an association, then refute only a few of them, pretending that the work of the others is no better. Refuse to address the science and data and just say that it's scientific racism and shouldn't be listened to. Once that is in place then you don't even have to report on any "controversy," you can just decline to acknowledge the topic altogether. 

I wonder if Quillette will have any effect.

SPAM

 My email spam has switched to power tools, cryptocurrency, IMF disbursements, and YETI coolers. Interesting how these things turn over, like a kaleidoscope.